What Is Call Tracking Software?
Call tracking software collects certain information from inbound calls and, in some cases, records the calls. This type of software can collect information about the geographic location of a person, the number that has called, and the digital marketing source of the call. Tracking calls helps companies bridge the gap between their marketing efforts and inbound leads as well as understanding where new business opportunities might lie.
What Kinds of Call Tracking Software Are Available?
Today, you’ll find four kinds of call tracking software available on the market. We’ve explained the key differences below.
Call-Back Function
A call-back tracking software is an internet-only solution, meaning it will be limited to working only with your online marketing efforts. When using the call-back function, a company will set up an advertisement which prompts a potential lead to provide his phone number. This information is collected by the call-back tracking software, and the company sets up a call with the sales lead.
As the potential lead inputs his information, a browser cookie saves information about how, where, and when he found the company’s online advertisement.
Call Number Tracking
Call number tracking software is based on a telephone server rather than a web server. The system provides a company with multiple numbers to track various marketing efforts both on- and offline. By providing multiple numbers, a call number tracking system can help marketers determine in which channels their efforts are best spent.
Dynamic Call Tracking
If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, dynamic call tracking will make tons of sense to you. Dynamic call tracking software allows marketers to program websites to swap phone numbers for each user when the website loads. This allows marketers to control which number is displayed to a potential lead based on pre-set criteria.
You will find two types of dynamic call tracking: channel based tracking and unique session tracking.
Channel based tracking involves collecting information about leads based on which channel they found their business. Typical channels include Google AdWords, Bing Ads, referral traffic, and organic traffic. Depending on where a lead finds your company (i.e. through an AdWords campaign), the software assigns a unique phone number to track that channel.
Unique session tracking collects information about a lead’s session on a website and allocates a unique number to each web session over a set time. By pooling numbers, the software can accurately determine where a lead was on your website when he made the call. You can tie this tracking to landing pages, marketing sources, content, keywords, split testing, and more.
Static Number Tracking
Static number tracking is more often used in traditional marketing. The advertising company provides different phone numbers for each ad source such as newspaper, magazine, billboard, and television.
What Are the Benefits of Call Tracking?
Your company is likely engaging in a variety of digital marketing activities like an AdWords campaign, extra landing pages, and guest content posting. But when leads call to ask about your product or service, there’s no way to keep track of how those leads found you apart from asking them. That’s tedious for everyone and highly inaccurate.
Installing call tracking software and utilizing the data it provides can help you in several ways.
Understand Marketing ROI for Each Channel
As we mentioned above, you’re probably pursuing several marketing activities online. You can certainly see what kinds of returns you’re getting through those efforts if you’re only communicating with customers online. If someone calls you after seeing your advertisement online, there isn’t a way for your AdWords dashboard to track that call.
Installing call tracking software enables you to assign a unique phone number to each digital channel and campaign you want to track. The tracked phone numbers lead to a deeper understanding of which digital channels reach your intended audience.
Find Inefficiencies in Your Budget
Through tracking your inbound calls via unique numbers, you can determine which channels are worth marketing through and which are not.
For example, you might pay to advertise in an online magazine, manage an AdWords campaign, and pay to advertise on an influencer’s blog. When the results come back, you might see you got 50 calls through the influencer’s blog but only 3 through the online magazine. Knowing this, you can pull your money from the online magazine and put it into more successful channels.
Collect Information for Retargeting Efforts
Depending on what kind of call tracking software you install, you will have a varying number of information points you can collect. By tracking inbound calls, you can learn more about how people are finding your company, what kind of websites they frequent, and even demographic information based on your knowledge of specific websites.
For example, you might run a PPC campaign on a website targeting men age 18-24 and another campaign targeting men age 45-54. Based on your call tracking, you might find the older age group only called you twice while the younger age group called 30 times. By that logic, you would allocate more money to advertising to the younger age group and even try a split test for age groups in between.
Improve Your Marketing Messages
Sometimes people don’t call the number on your advertisement because the message didn’t resonate with them. When you have excluded other factors, like your campaign failed because your message didn’t reach your intended audience, then you can reasonably assume your marketing messages might not be effective.
For example, if your company uses landing pages for campaigns, you can try split testing a landing page to determine the best marketing message and call-to-action to get your target audience to pick up the phone and call you.
See the Whole Picture
Many companies suffer from not being able to see the full picture when it comes to their marketing and sales efforts.
By adding call tracking software into your company’s marketing arsenal, you can harness the ensuing data to streamline marketing efforts, save money in channels with low returns, and even identify problems in your marketing messaging.